Spudman
December 30th, 2007, 07:22 PM
Peviously posted in another thread. Courtesy of Wingsdad.
"Compared to others I've had or heard? Well, I'll have to apologize first to the rest of the Fretters for dragging this thread a little off-topic by going into a quick 'review' here of the unit...
The 22 different Overdrives & Distortions include 11 faithful working versions of 5 of Boss's Biggies - my favorite being the 2 I had, the OD-1 & BD-2 (BluesDriver) - and very decent 'models' of 6 others, including the Ibanez Tube Screamer (TS-808, 'the Greenie') I'd had in my board. All better than the MXR Distortion+, which was my 4th of that breed.
From what I've seen in this thread and in Fretters' sigs, or with DVM's rig, I don't think I'm alone in saying that there's no single Overdrive or Distortion pedal that's a be-all end-all if you use different guitars (single coil loaded vs HB's, for instance) and/or amps. What's nice about the ME-50 is the OD/DiS section is you can, to a degree, combine the effects of 2 or 3 of the 11 OD/Dist units with what amounts to 11 preset combos of them.
The Mono & Stereo Chourses and Delays are on a par with Boss's big guy multis of those devices, maybe giving up just a bit of fine adjustment control. The Reverbs are decent, and independent of the Delay section.
The Expression Pedal is a little tricky because it doesn't have the 'travel width', particularly of a Cry Baby Wah; you need to be 'light on the foot'. So those who use a Wah 'extensively' may not dig it. For that touchiness reason, too, I prefer, still, to use my old Goodrich photocell Volume Pedal after this, and while the on board Tuner is pretty good in pinch, I still count on my Boss TU-12H for critical tuning.
I traded my 30 yr-old board loaded with 'vintage' stuff, some pretty beat up (stomp boxes, right?): the Cry Baby and those 4 Distortion pedals, plus an old Ross Flanger, an MXR Stereo Phaser, MXR Stereo Chorus and MXR DynaComp Compressor and a Boss NoiseGate, a power supply and all the little cables and patchjacks for this, even up. All I had to buy was the PSA-120 AC Adapter (it also runs on 6 AA's if you need it to).
I feel like I got everything I had in that board, or at least used a lot, plus I got a Harmonizer, an Octaver pedal, and more.
The biggest advantage? a lot less signal degradation and invitation to interference & noise from all that daisy-chaining. One plug in, one plug out."
"Compared to others I've had or heard? Well, I'll have to apologize first to the rest of the Fretters for dragging this thread a little off-topic by going into a quick 'review' here of the unit...
The 22 different Overdrives & Distortions include 11 faithful working versions of 5 of Boss's Biggies - my favorite being the 2 I had, the OD-1 & BD-2 (BluesDriver) - and very decent 'models' of 6 others, including the Ibanez Tube Screamer (TS-808, 'the Greenie') I'd had in my board. All better than the MXR Distortion+, which was my 4th of that breed.
From what I've seen in this thread and in Fretters' sigs, or with DVM's rig, I don't think I'm alone in saying that there's no single Overdrive or Distortion pedal that's a be-all end-all if you use different guitars (single coil loaded vs HB's, for instance) and/or amps. What's nice about the ME-50 is the OD/DiS section is you can, to a degree, combine the effects of 2 or 3 of the 11 OD/Dist units with what amounts to 11 preset combos of them.
The Mono & Stereo Chourses and Delays are on a par with Boss's big guy multis of those devices, maybe giving up just a bit of fine adjustment control. The Reverbs are decent, and independent of the Delay section.
The Expression Pedal is a little tricky because it doesn't have the 'travel width', particularly of a Cry Baby Wah; you need to be 'light on the foot'. So those who use a Wah 'extensively' may not dig it. For that touchiness reason, too, I prefer, still, to use my old Goodrich photocell Volume Pedal after this, and while the on board Tuner is pretty good in pinch, I still count on my Boss TU-12H for critical tuning.
I traded my 30 yr-old board loaded with 'vintage' stuff, some pretty beat up (stomp boxes, right?): the Cry Baby and those 4 Distortion pedals, plus an old Ross Flanger, an MXR Stereo Phaser, MXR Stereo Chorus and MXR DynaComp Compressor and a Boss NoiseGate, a power supply and all the little cables and patchjacks for this, even up. All I had to buy was the PSA-120 AC Adapter (it also runs on 6 AA's if you need it to).
I feel like I got everything I had in that board, or at least used a lot, plus I got a Harmonizer, an Octaver pedal, and more.
The biggest advantage? a lot less signal degradation and invitation to interference & noise from all that daisy-chaining. One plug in, one plug out."